Earlier this month, an interesting development within the Wii reverse engineering scene was announced as Fullmetal5 revealed that they had hacked the Wii Mini via a Bluetooth exploit. This bookends a flurry of a Wii Mini hacking, including rigorous hardware modding by DeadlyFoez. You may be wondering, "Wait, wasn't the Wii hacked over a decade ago?". That's true, but the Wii Mini stubbornly remained unhacked all the way into 2019.
This resiliency came from the Wii Mini's cut down …
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As seems to be happening annually, due to a short summer lull, we decided to combine the June and July Progress Reports. As you may have noticed, we're a few days into August at this point and things ended up running a bit late. That's actually a consequence of how we do these Progress Reports - we sometimes will go through big changes, test them, and get developer input on how they work in order to better explain them. In late July, a mixture of late changes, unexpected behaviors, and an …
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The past few months have been quite hectic with a slew of gigantic changes requiring lengthy articles alongside them. These big features all hitting together seems to have brought up a talking point in the community would be irresponsible to ignore. Everyone wants to know when Dolphin 6.0 is coming. After all, Dolphin 5.0 launched nearly three years ago and lacks features like Ubershaders, Bluetooth Passthrough, Hybrid XFB, Emulated Motion Plus... the list goes on. Unfortunately, we have to announce that we aren't especially close to a …
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The last few months have been absolutely hectic, with several long-awaited features hitting the emulator all at once. In order to keep users up to date with these major changes, the blog staff has been busy with feature article after feature article. It has been exciting, but also pretty exhausting! With us burning the candle at both ends to keep up with development, the Progress Reports have fallen a bit behind.
So here were are, bleary eyed and with three …
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Your eyes are not deceiving you, MotionPlus emulation is finally here. In a dramatic return to the project after a long hiatus, Billiard returned to the project with the goal of cleaning up emulated Wii Remotes and implementing emulated MotionPlus correctly once and for all. These efforts have greatly improved Dolphin's ability to create motions that games can recognize without the need for real Wii Remotes. The key behind these improvements was thinking about motions differently, by treating an emulated Wii Remote as a virtual object acting out these motions, …
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It's not common for a rewrite to be something that warrants an article, but, this is one of the exceptions. Over the past few years, parts of Dolphin's video core have seen renovations to make way for new features, but a fundamental problem remained. Dolphin's video backends suffered from both having too many unique features while also duplicating tons of code from the other backends, making it difficult to add new features and maintain old ones.
Those that have followed Dolphin from the very beginning may remember that its video backends …
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While there are a lot of notable changes to go through from the past two months, there's some notable news for the general Wii community. By the time this article is up, the Nintendo Wii Shop will be closed. Purchasing will be entirely disabled so all remaining Wii Points will be rendered useless, and even downloading of purchased games will be disabled at an undefined date in the future. While this may not seem like very big news for an emulator, Dolphin does actually support connecting to and buying …
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Even though the Wii's official library is mostly set, both the GameCube and Wii are entering a new golden age as a popular environment for randomizers, full-game mods, incredible cheat codes, and much more. Stalwarts like the Super Smash Bros. Brawl Mod, Project M have been around for years, but now there are many other communities around various games breathing new life into them. You can find codes to help balance games like Mario Party 5, content mods for Kirby Air Ride that add tons of new …
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Since the Dolphin 5.0 release, Dolphin has had opt-in usage statistics reporting to help us determine what hardware and builds users are using. Recently, this feature was also added to Dolphin Android, letting us see that around 10% of our users on development builds are using the Android version of Dolphin. Obviously, Dolphin on Android isn't going to be a perfect experience for quite some time, but in the meantime we will continue to add features and try to make the Android experience as clean as possible, even if the …
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One of the most interesting challenges of developing an emulator is that both the target hardware and most of the target software start out as black boxes. As often mentioned within emulation circles, the first step to developing an emulator for a console is getting unsigned code running on real hardware. While running unsigned code on the GameCube can be a bit of a pain, requiring custom hardware or a mixture of the broadband adapter and certain games, the Wii has one of the most robust homebrew environments of any console. …
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